Menu

Progress in G’s Room

Just before Thanksgiving I showed you guys the progress we (mostly my Mr.) had made transforming the room that had been our office into a new bedroom for G. Later that week we bought him a mattress and he was officially into his “big boy” room.

Several of the projects we’ve needed to do in there revolved around the weather cooperating so we could paint, or G cooperating and taking a nice, long nap, so it has been a pretty drawn out process getting anything done, but I thought I’d share where things are now.

Above is what the room looked like right before Thanksgiving, and here’s what it looks like today:

The dresser was the last Craigslist piece I found for the room, and I’ve already shown you how I went about distressing it, but it took me a bit longer to finish all of the drawers. We also had to bolt it to the wall before we were real comfortable with the idea of G actually using it, since the floors are not exactly level in our almost-90-year-old house and so it’s a bit tippy.

The reading lamp is one that I picked up from Walmart after searching every other store in existence for something I liked. It’s almost perfect. I had wanted the exact same style of lamp, but in brass to pick up the color from G’s bed and continue it through the room. Oh well.

The curtains are not even remotely close to being done. The people who lived here before us had the curtain rods for this room hung ON the wood trim above the windows…because apparently they preferred their windows to look as small as possible? I knew that I was going to want the rod to be as close to the ceiling as possible and to span the whole wall so we could move the curtains back away from the windows. That meant an almost 12′ curtain rod, so my Mr. followed this tutorial to make one out of electrical conduit. This was one of those “weather dependent” projects…and the tough part of working on a toddler’s room is that, unlike most projects, you can’t really do it while they nap. The rod just went up on Friday.

As you can see in these pictures, the light in his room is fabulous. It’s bright and sunny even on the gloomiest of days (the very first picture in the before/after shot was taken during the middle of a thunderstorm). That’s wonderful when it’s time to be awake and playing. It’s not so wonderful when it’s time for him to nap. You may be able to see some gold colored fabric peaking out from behind the canvas curtains in these shots. It took quite a bit of experimentation, and ultimately 3 layers of thick fabric to make a light barrier that actually darkened the room. Sewing those bad boys is going to be a serious undertaking.

The chair I added the cushions to has been perfect. The seat on it is a little wider than the glider we have in the nursery, so even with my growing belly, I can cuddle up with G to read his story. It’s a generally smaller chair than most, so it may not be quite as comfortable for my long-legged Mr, but it’s one of the few chairs I’ve sat in that I felt like it was actually correctly scaled to me.

The mattress/box spring set is from Ikea, as is the comforter, and the sheets are awesome, retro train/truck ones that Grandma B found at Salvation Army. I’m 99% certain that my boy cousins had the exact same set when I was growing up and G loves them.

We still have a lot of work to do. There is a toy box and a perfectly-sized table for G to play at still waiting to be distressed sitting in my basement that I need to get to. G picked out some yarn and I’m going to crochet him a blanket for his bed instead of the mishmash of ill sized ones we have on there now. I need to make a cover for his comforter. The bed could use a bed skirt. I need to finish cleaning my stuff out of the closet. The curtains need to be sewn and I need to find a more appropriately sized rug (that I don’t hate). I want to find some naval themed artwork for the walls and, because it’s my house, we’ve got to figure out somewhere we can put at least one mirror in there. Still a lot to do, but he’s one happy little boy, and the nursery is now empty and we can start prepping it for 2.0‘s arrival!